The importance of owning your own keys, Turkey case.
The case of Turkey is quite interesting and serves as an example of the path that governments and institutions will surely take to control the flow of our Bitcoins, at least those that are safeguarded in wallets of online exchanges, you know, of those that by rule (rather requirement) you must deliver your identity data (KYC) in addition to yielding the domain of the keys of your cryptos. It is necessary to consider that these entities that protect our cryptos as part of their security system take possession of the keys, so when there is any failure they (in theory) appeal to these passwords to solve the problem.
Recently the Turkish government announced the penalization of the exchange, trade and possession of Bitcoins and other cryptos in that territory, a measure with which they hope to revive the local currency, the Turkish lira (TRY), which is suffering the rigors of hyperinflation in the country and the economic disaster resulting from the debacle of the fiat model. Shortly thereafter a cryptocurrency exchange based in that country called Thodex found itself in the eye of the storm when its CEO, Faruk Fatih Özer, fled to Thailand with USD$ 2 Billion in various cryptocurrencies of its clients claiming that his life was in danger since the government of his country accuses him of alleged crimes that he alleges he did not commit.
Whether Özer is innocent or guilty of the accusations against him is not the most important part of this story, but the fact that the real victims of this bizarre situation are the customers who gave their passwords, and therefore their trust, to a third party to safeguard a value they may never get back. Because of this incident, the Turkish government takes the fact as an example of the danger that cryptocurrencies represent for society, accusing this type of money (and economy) as a vile fraud. The truth is that this incident has given reasons to the Turkish central power to justify its position against BTC before its people and the world, at the same time that it strengthens its path to create a method in which the State assumes control of the virtual currencies that are traded in the exchange houses authorized by the government, therefore, they will now be the owners of the values, at least of those that are associated with their tentacles.
I do not believe that the Turkish government will maintain this measure of prohibition against BTC and altcoins for many years, knowing the fact that another country that took the same measure, I mean China, recently its central bank announced certain relaxations in the use and trade of BTC and stablecoins, authorizing the banks of that nation to buy these cryptocurrencies and allow the exchange of these among themselves as well as with customers. Undoubtedly the Chinese central power before taking this step already established all the bases to intervene in the crypto market, especially BTC, within its territory.
Considering the above, the best option will always be to safeguard our cryptocurrencies by our own means, since in this way we not only get used to assume the safeguarding of our crypto-valuables but we also prevent third parties from taking our money. I have gone through unpleasant experiences with several exchanges that took my funds, since then I have learned the lesson: if I don't own my keys, they are not my cryptocurrencies. Surely what happened in Turkey will be replicated in other countries, surely in India, United Kingdom or United States since it is increasingly impossible for them to keep their economies in balance due to the impossibility to stop issuing money and to subsist in the face of the imminent fall of this Ponzi scheme that we call fiat model.
